Web Design Basics

Most people think web designers just pick colors and make things look pretty. The actual job is way more involved than that. So what…

Every website you visit was designed by someone who made deliberate choices about layout, color, typography, and how content is organized on screen. Understanding…

Open an SVG straight out of Illustrator and you’ll find a lot that has nothing to do with the drawing. Editor metadata, comments, hidden…

An SVG that looks fine in the editor and falls apart on the page is usually an embedding problem, not a file problem. The…

A button that works in Chrome and does nothing in Safari. That is the whole problem, and it usually shows up after launch, when…

Scroll a page built with parallax and the background drags behind the text instead of moving with it. That lag is the whole effect.…

A browser only ever shows you part of a page. That part is the viewport, and its width and height are what your layout…

Navigation is the part of a website that moves someone from one page to the next without them losing track of where they are.…

Tap the three stacked lines in a phone header and a list of links appears. Tap again and the header goes back to holding…

Run an ad and the click has to land somewhere. A landing page is that somewhere: a standalone page built for one campaign, pushing…

Open a site on your phone and you get maybe 600 pixels of it before anything needs scrolling. That visible chunk is what people…

Build a page for one screen width and it will break on every other one. Columns overlap, images run past the edge, and somebody…

Buttons that say “Buy Now” or “Start Your Free Trial” are doing a different job than the links buried inside a paragraph. They ask…

Open twelve tabs and the page titles stop doing anything useful. They get clipped down to four or five characters each. What you actually…

Scroll any homepage back to the top. That block sitting there, the one with a big headline, some kind of image behind it, and…

Resize a browser window on almost any site built in the last decade and the layout shifts at certain widths. Media queries are the…

Plenty of sites get along fine without breadcrumbs. The trouble starts once a catalog or a content library grows past two or three levels,…

WebAIM’s February 2026 scan of the top 1,000,000 home pages found 82.7% of them using ARIA beyond landmark roles, up from 79.4% in 2025.…

Accessibility work tends to get pushed to “later” until a complaint or a failed audit forces the issue, and by then the problems are…

Web accessibility checklists turn WCAG success criteria into pass or fail tests, and each test points at a barrier that users with visual, auditory,…

Two programs written by different teams, in different languages, still manage to exchange data all day long. An API is what makes that possible.…

WCAG 2.2 has no opinion on which font you pick. It names no typeface and no minimum font size. What it measures is contrast…

W3C has never published a separate set of mobile guidelines, so WCAG applies to native iOS and Android apps by interpretation. Each criterion gets…

A screen reader can only tell you which header a cell belongs to if the markup says so. That is most of what makes…

Open the home page of almost any site and an automated scan will find something wrong with it. WebAIM’s February 2026 analysis of the…

Most forms on the web still fail at the first hurdle, which is telling a screen reader user what a field is for. The…

Every piece of text sits on some background, and the luminance gap between the two is what color contrast describes. It gets reported as…

Before anyone picks a font, somebody has to decide what goes where. That decision lives in a wireframe. It’s a low-detail blueprint of a…

Minimalist design removes every element that isn’t doing a job. What’s left on the page, the screen, or the shelf stays because something would…

User experience covers what a person notices, feels, and does across an entire interaction with a product. That includes the parts nobody thinks of…